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Tuesday, July 23, 2013

To call Renato
Polselli’s The Truth According to
Satan a.k.a. La verità secondo
satana a movie about a woman being framed and blackmailed for her lover’s
murder just doesn’t really capture what it’s all about. Anyone familiar with Polselli’s work will know that there’s
usually a lot more to it than that, with the story being more like groundwork
for filmmaking experimentation and expressionism, not to mention some truly
disorienting editing. One could say the satanic title is misleading, but taking
a lot of the, what I’m assuming to be, elaborate metaphors, it’s possible to
make an attempt to figure in a correlation between the title and the film’s
events. It’s like a type of art that one could draw numerous interpretations
from and yet still be quite off.

A woman, Diana (Rita Calderoni, whose beautiful eyes still shine through in the
fuzzy looking, low quality version I watched), seems to be at the core of a
man’s, Roibert’s (Isarco Ravaioli),
depressions. Sick of himself and going through what is no doubt an existential
crises, he deeply contemplates and, in a melodramatic bout of playing Russian
roulette with himself, fails at committing suicide, an insult which only seems
to further his unease.

Calling up the lady of his sorrows, Diana, in the midst
of a love affair with her female companion/slave, Yanita (Marie-Paule Bastin), Roibert informs her of his failed attempt at
killing himself, threatening to try again. She hastily comes over to his place,
looking nice and sexy, and Roibert eventually does stab and kill himself while
leaning over her, smearing his blood over her. The neighbor, a strange jester
of a man, Totoletto (Sergio Ammirata,
chewing the scenery like none have ever done before), seems to have witnessed
enough of the incident from the window to decide to have a fun time with the
situation, turning the film into a deranged comedy from here on out.

Saturday, July 6, 2013

In the right mindset, Filmirage productions like Ghosthouse,
Witchery, and Troll 2 can be a lot of fun, with a great amount of low budget
cheese and outrageous horror. There were a couple titles that I thought stood
out of this mold that were actually quite harrowing and long winded (in a good
way) like Hitcher in the Dark and Door to Silence. I’ve always had a soft
spot for the company, and I do aspire to see every Filmirage movie, myself, someday.

The company was founded in 1980
by Joe D’Amato, cult film favorite
and director of nasty gore classics Beyond
the Darkness and Antropophagus
as well as most of the output from the guilty pleasure that is the Black Emanuelle series with Laura Gemser, who’s as classy as these BE films are sleazy. The company pelted
out titles fairly consistently from 1980 to 1994, eventually ceasing to make films
from what I’m guessing to be a kind of commercial low point in Italian cinema.
There are most certainly a number of notorious cult classics among the selection
which spans at least forty-five movies.

Directed by Joe D’Amato and Claudio Lattanzi,
Killing Birds, or as it has become
known in the US Zombie 5: Killing Birds,
placing it into the infamously confusing Zombi
series lineup, is a mixed bag with all of the elements that make a Filmirage horror movie a lot of fun.

It
should be taken into consideration that Zombie
5: Killing Birds actually isn’t much of a zombie film nor is it much of a
killer bird film, so it would probably suffice to say that it was titled
poorly. Ninety-nine percent of everyone going into this will be expecting a
zombie movie, but there are only a few zombies, and they’re more like ghoulish
closet monsters, which don’t bite their victims, but rather they thrash them
about, resulting in some pretty brutal gore. I’m not kidding. Watch Jennifer’s
(Lin Gathright) death scene at around
56:30, and try to tell me this movie doesn’t have balls.